The Casebook
of Carnacki the Ghost-Finder by
William Hope Hodgson
Wordsworth
Editions, paperback, £4.99, July 2006, ISBN 9781840225297
As
far as I can tell from various online sources, this story was completed by
Hodgson before his death, found among his papers by Betty, and submitted to
The
Premier Magazine by her in 1919. She declined a request to revise it by the
editor, David Whitelaw, but he published it anyway ten years later. The reasons
for his tardiness remain unknown and I wonder if the decision to publish wasn’t
either part of or a precursor to the revival of interest in Hodgson in the
nineteen thirties. The
Jarvee is a haunted sailing ship, aboard which
Carnacki travels at the bidding of its owner, Captain Thompson, for the purposes
of explaining the strange weather phenomena that seem to accompany its every voyage.
The vessel is beset by shadows, squalls, the death of two sailors, more
shadows, mist, lightning, silence, more shadows still, and near-capsizing, all
of which Hodgson depicts in a compelling and captivating way and no doubt with
great authenticity. While ‘The Haunted
Jarvee’ seems to be the most
popular of the posthumous cases, I found it disappointing in consequence of a pervasive
vagueness and opacity. We have no idea of the voyage’s location beyond ‘the
Atlantic’, explanation of both the cause of the weather and Carnacki’s attempts
to counter it are restricted to ‘attractive vibrations’ and ‘repellent
vibrations’ respectively, and the supernatural rationale for the haunting is
dismissed with, “The vast unknown it is vain to speculate upon”. One would have
hoped that, as an occult detective, such speculation was precisely Carnacki’s job.
There is nonetheless an often-ignored point of interest worth mentioning. Referring to his ‘Saaamaaa
Ritual’, Carnacki suggests that Arkright, one of his dinner guests, has a better
knowledge of magic than he does, a casual aside that raises a host of possibilities…
No comments:
Post a Comment